The 50 Greatest Hits (HDCD)

This release appears to be a HDCD edition of the Greatest Hits compilation from a few years back, is it?

Design

As with all CDs from the far east we recently found this one comes in a slipcase too. They manage to create a new way to fold out the slipcase with almost every release. But with this one it was hard to get the CD out of the slipcase once you opened it. And a collector doesn’t want to loose the slipcase so we had to be careful.

The design is a straight copy of the “50 Greatest Hits” from 2001, but flipped from right to left. The booklet contains most the lyrics, and most of them just typed out. We wonder why they didn’t do that for all the lyrics, or browse the World Wide Web to add the missing ones … it could take no more than ten minutes to complete all the lyrics. But this was probably too much effort for the (so called) producers of these releases. They also forgot to use the spelling checker, and made some of the same typos we showed you in previous reviews of these HDCD releases.

Content

In contrary to what we expected with the copy of title and design, this release is not the HDCD copy of the original 2001 greatest hits release. It is another selection. The first disc is the “ELV1S 30 #1 Hits” without the “A Little Less Conversation” remix; the second disc is a selection of songs we already saw on various other HDCD releases. Good and original songs by itself, but nothing new. That makes this second disc just another compilation.

The CD is released on the "SONY Classical" label (well according to the label that is).

Conclusion

This CD is for the die hard collectors only. Nothing new, but a good collection of songs to play every now and then. Besides the typos the design is attractive and for the price … try eBay, you can probably get this copy of "ELV1S 30 #1 Hits" with a bonus disc for less than seven dollar and a few dollars more for shipping.